To Return to the Office, Or Not Return to the Office, That is the Question (Future of Work Thread)

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Ah yes if there's one thing my workplace needs, it's a communal masturbation pod.

It's gimmicky. Besides, I thought that was what bathroom stalls were for?

 

[3074326]

It's gimmicky. Besides, I thought that was what bathroom stalls were for?

Honestly, a bathroom is probably a significant upgrade after that VR headset has been used one time.

We do have a "quiet room" at work. Just a room with a couple chairs. I have a feeling it has been a communal masturbation pod.

 

[Zurp]

When COVID hit, our company asked people to stay home. I we needed to ask permission to come into the office. Then people slowly started to come back.

Then they fired a bunch of people.

Then Christmas 2020-2021, and they said, "Everyone has to stay home." They said 2 people in each office can work in the office. They threatened to fire people who didn't comply, and I think they did fire a couple of people. But they didn't fire everyone, so I think that was just an excuse to fire those people.

Then we were told to come back to work for 2-3 days a week last summer. But they decided to fire a bunch of people first.

I think they tried to say, "Hey! Come back to work, Dummies!!!" But no one cared.

Most people who are supposed to be in the office are coming into the office now, but most of the empty offices are because they fired so many people. By the way, guess who gets to do their work, now? Oh wait, I was supposed to state that I have two thumbs, or something. Anyway, guess who isn't completing all the work? (Damn - I still have two thumbs.)

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Bartleby
The return of the crowded office
It will take time to readjust to the presence of real-life colleagues
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/03/12/the-return-of-the-crowded-office

Two years ago this month the era of remote working abruptly began. As the first wave of covid-19 cases prompted lockdowns in the West, white-collar workers had to get used to new ways of conducting themselves. Unmuting was not yet a reflex movement, Zoom fatigue not yet a common affliction.

Now another era is getting under way. Unless a new variant of the virus again intervenes, more and more workers will go to the office for at least a portion of their working week. Guidance to work from home was lifted in Britain in January. American Express expects to see people back in its offices in America from March 15th; employees of Citigroup, Google and Apple have been given return dates of March 21st, April 4th and April 11th, respectively.

Another period of adjustment is unfolding, and not just to the novel demands of hybrid work. People also have to get used to the physical reality of once again being surrounded by three-dimensional colleagues—people who gaze, chatter, slurp, wheeze, clatter, rustle and fidget.

Some readjustments are clear: wearing trousers is a requirement, not a lifestyle choice. Others are less obvious. Making eye contact with someone else’s actual eyes is a skill that needs to be relearned as the office fills up again. Too little, and you come across as uninterested. Too much, and you seem uncomfortably intense. A study in 2016 found that three seconds of mutual eye contact was about right for the average person (just don’t count out loud).

Small talk is another lost skill. You do not have to politely nod and smile at people when working from home. Asking after the family is just weird when you are speaking to your spouse and children. By contrast, a crowded office demands endless casual pleasantries, whether bumping into someone in the corridor and clustering at the coffee machine or holding doors open and waiting for the lift. There is a pay-off to platitudes: researchers from Rutgers University and the University of Exeter found in 2020 that small talk enhanced workers’ sense of well-being and connectedness. But chatting about nothing requires practice, even for extroverts.

Meetings are entirely different in the offline world, in good ways and bad. The good includes greater spontaneity and the fact that no one freezes mid-speech, their face contorted into a hideous rictus. The bad is that many habits developed at home must quickly be unlearned upon returning to the office.

You cannot openly do other work: tapping away on a laptop while someone drones on is perfectly acceptable on Zoom, but not in the same room. You cannot magically disguise yourself from view by turning off a camera. Any eye-rolling you do will be seen; headbanging the table in exasperation will be noticed.

In theory you could ask all the attendees of a real-life meeting to come with you while you root around in a cupboard for a biscuit, but it is so much simpler to go foraging when you are Zooming. You cannot leave pointless meetings as easily in the office, either. In the virtual world, salvation is just a click and an insincere-apology-in-the-chat away; in the physical world you have to move chairs, mutter excuses and negotiate the door handle. Exit, pursued by a stare.

The realities of corporeal colleagues show up in other ways, too. Take seating. Rarely do you amble into your own living room to find Malcolm from marketing there. In newly crowded offices you will be competing with him to book a desk; worse, he may be your neighbour. Heating is another example. Women are more productive at temperatures warmer than those men prefer, but they are less likely to have control of the thermostat in the office than in their homes.

And this is to say nothing of the underlying concerns that drove people to vacate their offices in the first place—the infectiousness and virulence of covid-19. Company by company, new norms of physical interaction will emerge and change over the coming months. Handshake, fistbump or simple “hello”? Masks on, off or slung under the chin, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice? Socially distanced or just social?

The start of the hybrid era is good news. It means that the pandemic has moved into a new and less threatening phase. Companies can now try to blend the benefits of in-person interaction with the flexibility to work remotely that many employees crave. But the proximity of people will still take time to get used to again.

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Work life in balance
Is hybrid work the worst of both worlds?
Evidence is piling up that it might be
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/03/12/is-hybrid-work-the-worst-of-both-worlds

After several false starts, office workers are returning to their desks—for good this time, employers hope. As covid-19 restrictions are scaled back, people must again get used to crowds. Financial giants such Wells Fargo have joined Wall Street titans such as JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley in urging people back to the office. The great return is afoot in big tech, too. Meta and Microsoft are asking employees to return by late March. Most big Silicon Valley campuses will be fuller from April. Many bosses share the sentiment of James Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive: if you can eat out, you can come to the office.

For purveyors of remote-working tech, the gradual unwinding of the grand work-from-home experiment is already proving rough. Slack, a corporate-chat app owned by Salesforce, a software giant, projects slowing sales growth to 20% in the next quarter, year on year, down from 50% at the height of the pandemic. In February Zoom reported that growth had slowed globally, with revenues in Europe, the Middle East and Africa down by 9%, compared with a year earlier, and the number of its video-conferencing clients had declined relative to the previous quarter. Its market value has sunk as a result (see chart).


The return to the office will be no picnic for employers, either. Most are scrambling to figure out what the future of work will look like. For many, the most pressing question is: how hybrid will that future be? In the short run, almost certainly pretty hybrid. Apple is bringing staff back to the office one day a week to start. By May 23rd, the iPhone-maker will require them to come in three days a week. Citigroup, hsbc and Standard Chartered let their bankers work from home on some days.

That seems only natural. Combining office and home toil appeared to do wonders for work-life balance. And on the face of it, the past two years have shown that people can work well from anywhere, says Despina Katsikakis of Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy. Productivity, collaboration and focus seem to have held up.

The problem, says Ms Katsikakis, is that “all of the other elements are suffering.” In one global survey of more than 600 company leaders and human-resources professionals, for example, more than 80% responded that hybrid set-ups were emotionally exhausting for employees. Many ringing endorsements of it made by bosses and workers in mid-2021 turned into deep reservations just a few months later. As more people return to the office, concerns about hybridisation are likely to become ever more acute. Rather than being the best of both worlds, is hybrid work really a rotten compromise?

The hybrid workplace is failing to live up to expectations in a number of ways. For one thing, it is no substitute for the buzz and the chatter of the pre-pandemic office. Many people hanker after the socialising, camaraderie and shared experience, even if getting used to it again may take time. Even small amounts of remote work can have a big impact on the frequency of face-to-face interactions in the office. By one estimate, spending an average of three days each week in the office can limit encounters between any two workers by 64% compared with pre-pandemic norms. The gap widens to 84% in potential interactions for those in the office two days a week.

As offices fill up, workers who turn up in person may therefore forge closer bonds with their teams and company leaders than remote ones. Proximity bias—the subconscious tendency to value and reward physical presence—may then disadvantage women, minorities and parents of young children, who are keener on home working than other groups.

A related drawback is the decline in casual encounters outside an employee’s inner circle. In the 1970s Thomas Allen, a management scholar, discovered that communication between office workers dropped off exponentially with distance between their desks; those on separate floors or in separate buildings almost never spoke. A study of more than 60,000 employees at Microsoft, a tech giant, in the first half of 2020 showed that virtual workers, too, were less likely to connect with people they were not already close to.

Before the pandemic many companies were going to great lengths to overcome the “Allen curve” and engineer serendipity. Google, which credits spontaneous chats for products such as Gmail and Street View, designed its Silicon Valley headquarters to ensure that any one Googler could reach any other by walking no more than two and a half minutes. Bathrooms at the headquarters for Pixar, an animation studio co-founded by Steve Jobs, Apple’s late boss, were located in the central atrium so that people from different teams would cross paths as they heeded nature’s call.

Some managers have tried to boost connections in the hybrid world by scheduling more virtual meetings, sending more emails or firing off more instant messages. This, though, leaves workers feeling drained as a result of virtual overload. Video calls leave people feeling tired and uneasy. That, in turn, makes them likelier to avoid social interaction, without quite knowing why, according to researchers at Stanford University. (Possible reasons include excessive eye contact, which human brains associate with either conflict or mating; staring at yourself, which can lead to feelings of insecurity; or the difficulty of interpreting non-verbal cues on screen.) Electronic communication limits physical movement, which impairs cognitive performance. And constant chat notifications are a distraction.

Providers of virtual workspaces believe that these shortcomings can be fixed with better technology. Microsoft’s Outlook platform now allows employers to tailor their employees’ scheduling settings by inserting breaks between video calls and, the tech giant claims, helps bosses spot underlings at risk of burnout. It even offers a “virtual commute” for those hybrid workers who struggle to separate work and home life. Users are reminded to wrap up their tasks, prepare for the next day, log their emotions and unwind with Headspace, a meditation app. To make online communication more seamless and less exhausting, Zoom has launched a digital whiteboard, real-time automated translations and desk-phone software.

Not all employers are convinced. Some cannot reinstate pre-covid working patterns fast enough. Wall Street is the prime example. Blackstone, a private-equity firm, has asked key staff to return to the office full-time. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has argued that remote working kills creativity, hurts new employees and slows down decision-making. Fears that forcing employees back to the office will drive them away may be overblown, bankers say. Mr Gorman has reported that Morgan Stanley received about 500,000 job applications last year despite its strict return-to-work policy.

Other companies are dealing with the pitfalls of hybridisation by going even more remote. Dropbox, a cloud-storage firm, is adopting a “virtual first” approach to avoid the problem of remote workers becoming second-class citizens (though it maintains collaborative physical spaces where workers can meet in person). Other technology companies, from Robinhood to Shopify and Spotify, have gone largely virtual for similar reasons.

Hybrid work’s flaws notwithstanding, most companies will fall somewhere between those two extremes, hoping to strike a balance between the convenience of remote work and the camaraderie of the office. Some may even succeed. But in trying to win over both sides of the debate, many risk satisfying neither. ■

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

 

[BuckBackHome]

I drove by that CPA firm the other day. 5 cars in a lot I think built to handle 150 cars. This is during peak CPA season too. I wonder what the partners in the firm think of their building debt.

 

[exhawg]

Work life in balance
Is hybrid work the worst of both worlds?
Evidence is piling up that it might be
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/03/12/is-hybrid-work-the-worst-of-both-worlds

This was my biggest stock regret. Unrelated to Covid Zoom stock tanked in Dec 2019 and I contemplated putting some money into it knowing every vendor that we deal with other than Cisco and CDW had moved to Zoom over the past couple years. Would have bought it for $62 a share and it's unlikely I would have sold it before Covid kicked in and the stock skyrocketed to over $470 in Sept. Minimally it would have taken at least a year or two off my retirement age.

 

[AuTX Buckeye]

this article from last year really nailed one of the main driving forces of back to the office

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/work-from-home-benefits/619597/

Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seemproductive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.

the real-estate piece also plays a huge roll as well. However the old school managers, those who insist on micro managing everything are also drivers and admittedly there are folks who just dont want to work from home.

 

[jwinslow]

This was my biggest stock regret. Unrelated to Covid Zoom stock tanked in Dec 2019 and I contemplated putting some money into it knowing every vendor that we deal with other than Cisco and CDW had moved to Zoom over the past couple years. Would have bought it for $62 a share and it's unlikely I would have sold it before Covid kicked in and the stock skyrocketed to over $470 in Sept. Minimally it would have taken at least a year or two off my retirement age.

Yep there were a few obvious slam dunk stocks (amd was the one I cried about, as they were obliterating Intel but sliding in stock pricing), but being shut down from generating new income makes it challenging to invest.

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

This was my biggest stock regret. Unrelated to Covid Zoom stock tanked in Dec 2019 and I contemplated putting some money into it knowing every vendor that we deal with other than Cisco and CDW had moved to Zoom over the past couple years. Would have bought it for $62 a share and it's unlikely I would have sold it before Covid kicked in and the stock skyrocketed to over $470 in Sept. Minimally it would have taken at least a year or two off my retirement age.

Same.

A few months before covid hit the US (and maybe even before it spread in Wuhan) I was at a networking event where the keynote speaker was talking about it being a good time to invest in Zoom stock. He was mentioning about how it was really low and was forecasting that it would increase in value sooner or later. He had no idea what would await in March 2020.

 

[5 STAR U-G-A]

Kind of related to the WFH/Remote work subject, I've been hearing from people in the Caribbean/Latin America that this concept/brand has been growing there. It's also in the US, Europe, and Australia. Anyone have any experience with it?

This article is 3-4 years old, so it's interesting to see what the forecast was before WeWork crashed and the Pandemic.

Selina Is The Digital Nomad Hotel Of The Future
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sophiefriedman/2018/09/06/selina-the-nomad/?sh=165af7781575

In the minds of Rafi Museri and Daniel Rudasevski, Selina is a 29-year-old Latin American world traveler. Museri describes her as “honest, humble, beautiful. She hosts you, she hugs you. You want to be with her.” It was Daniel's wife Natalie Rudasevski who came up with the name Selina, and this fictitious Millennial traveler was the inspiration for Selina, Rudasevski and Museri’s enormously successful chain of nomad-focused hostel/hotel/coworking spaces. In 2015 the pair opened the first Selina in Pedasi, a then-sleepy fishing village in Panama. Today Selina is in eight countries in Latin America, across 25 destinations urban and rural, and it’s coming to the US and Europe: Selina Porto opens this month and Miami in December.

The Playground (restaurant/bar/events space) at Selina in Bogota, Colombia

SELINA
Museri has been preparing for Selina all his life. When he was 13 years old he decided to go live on a kibbutz, a collective community in Israel. “You have to work after school, and there’s no summer vacation. But you’re living with your friends in a very beautiful community, and I fell in love with this community thing.” Living in Tel Aviv’s now ultra-trendy Jaffa neighborhood, Museri says he saw 300% real estate appreciation, realized how community-building impacts real estate prices, and learned about the value of community-sharing social life. He spent 11 years in the army, “learning about management, prioritization, loyalty”—skills he and Rudasevski bring to Selina—and says he loved it because he had amazing friends with whom he’d travel the world.

The Playground at Selina in Antigua, Guatemala

SELINA
Daniel Rudasevski went backpacking when he finished his military service, like so many young Israelis. He ended up in a surfing village in Costa Rica, and a couple of years later he met Museri, whose best mate was friends with Daniel’s brother. Selina was a global brand right from the start: its founders are Israeli but it started and is now headquartered in Panama, where its staff are from around the globe. Selina practices exactly what it preaches: a fun, international, creative working (and living) environment. Museri and Rudasevski wanted Selina to be Latin American. “Even though Selina is going global, we’re very happy the brand was born in Latin America,” Museri says. “I see Selina as forever 29. The values of the brand are her values. We wanted to know what her experiences were around the world. When we’re coming to a new place we think what would Selina choose to do here?" And that leads to the menu of tours at Selina—like biking with cycling company Equipoin Medellin, Colombia; surfing lessons through Selina Surf Club, whale watching,sailing; and, at its urban locations, loads of city tours.

Glamping at Selina in La Fortuna, Costa Rica

Selina takes disused spaces, like a chocolate factory (Budapest), school and asylum (Bogota), and plenty of former hotels. In choosing empty, sometimes non-traditional properties, Rudasevski and Museri commit themselves to engaging and revitalizing the local community. They build these properties out into digital nomad dream worlds, with local artwork; street art on the walls; reclaimed wood furniture from local designers and artisans; yoga and meditation spaces; coworking space; library; shared kitchen; and The Playground. This is the communal space in every Selina where travelers sip green juice and tuck into salads, grain bowls, and local seafood; work on collaborative projects, attend talks, and catch up with other travelers over a cold beer as a DJ spins in the corner. There are US$10/night beds in a hostel-type dorm; private rooms with shared and private baths from US$40; trendy deluxe rooms from US$160; and, at some locations family rooms (from US$100).

A Unique-category room at Selina in Cancun, Mexico

SELINA
Selinas has all the makings of a party atmosphere—a bar, DJs, inexpensive dorm rooms and the corresponding backpackers—but there are far more digital nomads here than long-term Spring Breakers. Just after 7am the breakfast tables begin filling up with travelers eager to take on the day, piling their plates with phenomenal banana bread, eggs, and heaps of tropical fruit. By 8am, the quiet, well-appointed coworking spaces are half full—journalists writing, photographers editing, a group of techies coding, and a few people sipping coffee and chatting in English and Spanish about their projects.

The coworking space at Selina in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

SELINA
In April, Selina raised US$95m in funding and their worldwide explosion began in earnest. Their first European and US locations welcome nomads this month in Porto, Portugal and in December in Miami’s Little Havana. Rudasevski and Museri are smart businessmen, ultra-charismatic, just like their character Selina. “When we opened the first Selina in early 2015, we didn’t know what it meant, but we thought it would be interesting: coworking and rooms in an experiential place. Then we opened a second one and realized we’d created an incredible experience for people and a community behind it. When you launch a product, you’re scared—no one gives you money, you take your entire savings, you hope it’s going to work. We didn’t know from day one. Now I’m certain.”

Cheerful decor at Selina in Cancun, Mexico

SELINA
“Our vision with Selina is to have this platform that delivers experiences globally, but we can’t standardize anything. For us to be able to locate ourselves in places the local community appreciates takes times. We, the entire team, will succeed when you can pay $1,000/month and travel globally in 100 cities,” Museri adds. The pair know exactly where they’ll be: in at least 40 locations in Europe, the US, and Latin America by the end of 2019. By 2020, in 100-plus locations worldwide. Their vision is 350 locations around the world, 100,000 beds globally, 180 staffers hired per month, and it’s happening: like Uber and Airbnb, Selina will become a household name.

A Unique-category room at Selina in San Jose, Costa Rica

SELINA
Museri and Rudasevski themselves embody Selina; working remotely, traveling the world, meeting new people, forming lasting bonds. Their desire to build Selina was personal. Museri says he is “not a person that can live in an environment that is just professional. I hate it. My dream is just to make interesting spaces around the world. I am 1,000% driven by the social aspect. Life has to be with people.”

 

[OHSportsFan]

Kind of related to the WFH/Remote work subject, I've been hearing from people in the Caribbean/Latin America that this concept/brand has been growing there. It's also in the US, Europe, and Australia. Anyone have any experience with it?

This article is 3-4 years old, so it's interesting to see what the forecast was before WeWork crashed and the Pandemic.

Selina Is The Digital Nomad Hotel Of The Future
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sophiefriedman/2018/09/06/selina-the-nomad/?sh=165af7781575

This feels like a mix of WeWork and Yacht Week in Croatia.

I’m intrigued but I don’t think my bosses would trust me (ok, I wouldn’t trust me).

 

[Jake]

Left the office last year (had nothing to do with Covid, it was planned), after 30+ years, with no regrets. I work for who I want, when I want. It's my time now.

 

[sparcboxbuck]

This feels like a mix of WeWork and Yacht Week in Croatia.

I’m intrigued but I don’t think my bosses would trust me (ok, I wouldn’t trust me).

Ha! I’d trust you if you were on my team. I regularly have people on my team travel for fun and work during the day and enjoy being not home during the off hours. It’s not uncommon for some folks on my team to travel and do an early in / early out and enjoy some of the day when they are traveling as well. One of my people just spent almost three months working from India. She got married and had some time off for that but we let her work there remotely for six weeks. As long as shit’s getting done, it’s all good by me.

Hell, from end of January to end of April this year I’m living in Indiana. I do a morning shift and then from 4:00 - 6:00 I go coach and then come back and put in a couple of hours in the evening. It’s working great… that ‘late shift’ gives me time to actually get shit done because I’m not in meetings that other people seem to assume my presence to be a requirement. It also gives me time to schedule meetings with my west coast staff when things are quiet and not rushed.

My employer has been great about accommodating this schedule…. I guess it all comes down to corporate culture. You should become a data scientist and come work for me… we’ll work something out.